An Artist's Spiritual Inquiry (Part 2)

As I considered the underlying causes of ecological destruction, I noticed that the idea that art passively expresses what a society or culture is up to isn’t the whole story. No, art actively prescribes what a society or culture does by affecting what its members can see as real. I saw how art, particularly the art celebrated in our art history books, museums and galleries has played an important role in creating the kind of consciousness that destroys its habitat.

Crisis solved: my role in environmental protection, my form of ecological activism, was precisely art. I committed myself wholeheartedly to a career of creating art that would change that consciousness. To whatever extent lies in the power of one individual, I would nudge our culture toward the paradigm of ecological healing and sustainable harmony. 

At first I took a somewhat political approach to what such art would look like. I felt the urgency of stopping pollution, saving rainforests, decommissioning nuclear power plants. At some point, I began synchronizing my artistic process with ritual. I began each studio session with meditation, then an intention that the work I was starting would somehow, mysteriously, be healing to the earth. Then I worked. I gave myself to trusting that spirit presence I was experiencing more frequently: it would guide my work into a form that was needed.

After a time of working this way, I was one day dumbstruck by the hubris of seeking to heal the earth. I laughed out loud at the absurdity. We’re the frickin’ disease! By that time I had a personal, visceral awareness of the vast consciousness of the earth and her life forms. I reframed what I sought to do as an artist: to serve the earth in her efforts to heal us. To heal us crazy humans so that we might return to harmony before destroying the many species dependent with us on the very conditions we’re so determined to destroy.

An Artist's Spiritual Inquiry (Part 1)

I began to paint and draw seriously at about the same time I first had woods to wander in at leisure—about 6 or 7 year old. Until I was 12, the time I spent there was so vital that I often say I was raised by trees. The viewpoint I’ve brought to almost everything is unique in my family and society, but quite common in the family and society of forests. Ecological values entered my bones and my soul sitting at the knees of my wise elders, the trees.

The various storms of adolescence and young adulthood blew me through some religious experimentation, especially with Catholicism, atheism, Buddhism, and ancient goddess religions. Zen Buddhism, modified by pagan goddesses, influenced me over the long haul. But over the years the wisdom of the forest has become the prime measure of spiritual truth.

When I look around the world, taking in its vast suffering as well as its unfathomable beauty and persistent joys, I conclude that the most important spiritual question facing our culture and our species is how to restore harmony with the rest of nature, with all the diverse members of the family of life. I include in this beings that our culture doesn’t usually consider living, like stones, rivers, the underground seep of water, the wind and clouds.

The urgency of the environmental crisis came to me early. Raised by trees, I was aware of the degradations of development before I reached my teens. I saw it with my own eyes, without anyone mentioning it. By the time I was in college, many people had noticed the urgency, and created Earth Day. This public expression prompted a personal crisis: how could I be an artist (which was all I ever wanted to be) when the world desperately needed saving?

Wolves Running 2 - Acrylic Painting

Here's the finished acrylic version (24 x 36") of the orange wolves, our gifts to the world. I find it a little shocking in its unabashed orangeness, but the strangest people love it. Including my super-critical young adult daughter & a very distinguished elder woman. 

What's always interesting about being a little shocked or even downright disgusted by a new painting is that the sensation is completely non-informative about the quality of the work. Misleading even. While the artist may think that the painting is bad, we've simply failed, often it's just that the painting is ahead of us. When we catch up, the painting is suddenly beautiful.

I recognize that my beliefs about what's happening in the world & what role I might play are in a particularly rich flux. Books I've been reading—In the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Mate, A Language Older Than Words by Derrick Jensen—are helping me bring this flux to conscious thought.

In the process, how I see this painting changes.

All I have to say right now is this: These running wolves are not hurrying. They are exerting their joyful strength.

Wolves Running

This is a watercolor study (11 x 16.5") of an idea for an acrylic painting on canvas. I chose to try it out in watercolor before committing to canvas because the original sketch was mystifying. Would it work?

Orange wolves carry the meaning of what one gives to the world—the activity of sharing one's talents generously, vigorously. The sweep of night sky implies the great mystery, all that is beyond human understanding. Maybe the wolves understand, or run in harmony with it.The little pennant shapes with elements of life—bone, leaf, snowflake, flower—also suggest the continuity of the particular & the vast. Maybe the message of this painting is that our personal gifts are made in the context of all that is small & all that is cosmic.

I welcome your interpretations.

This painting is on exhibit at Quercia Gallery in Duncans Mills, CA, until May 31. It will be at Sebastopol Gallery later this summer. 

Coyote Wind watercolor, 17 x 22"

 

Last summer I painted this coyote gazing out into what? the future? Whatever it is, he looks happy to see it, so it must be good. The little shapes underfoot suggest the elements of life coyote & we depend on.

 

Earlier this week I hung this painting in a show with Victoria Whitehand at Quercia Gallery in Duncans Mills. Our show is called "Inner Light ~ Outer Music," & is a unique expression of Buddhists wandering in the world.

 

I first met Victoria in 1993 when she was curating an international show of Buddhist art. The following year she invited me to co-curate (the show was annual for 5 years). We became good friends, & for a time walked together every week at Ragle Ranch Park (in Sebastopol).

 

Not long after I met her, she went off north for a 3 year, 3 month, 3 day Tibetan Buddhist retreat. When she returned, she became lama of Gold Ridge Sangha, now called Kagyu Takten Puntsokling. Meanwhile, after 30 years of Zen practice, I drifted into something less definable & more Native (still cherishing my teachers & the Dharma).

 

Victoria's works in our show are bold, nearly abstract caves & canyons: inner light. Mine are mythic animals in odd situations: outer music. Yet they converse with each other. Our colors, our shapes echo, shine & dance together.

 

In the show, you can finally see what coyote is looking at: the glowing light of one of Victoria's beautiful canyons. The music of Coyote, the light of Dharma.

The First Sonnet

beloved friend, you have encountered me

amid a storm of trials & anguished cries,

our leaders fat with ignorance & lies,

this twenty-first, beleaguered century.

the shallowness of people’s goals kills hope.

the beings whom we trust are seen as meat

or measured for their profit in board feet.

we search for kindred souls to help us cope.

along your lines of face my thoughts are curled.

your gentle rain of words renews my heart.

what meaning in this chance our roots have crossed

within the struggles of a breaking world,

when creatures, sacred sites, & faith depart,

this time of blasted lands & species lost?

A Crown of Sonnets

In a recent conversation, my poet friend Hale Thatcher introduced me to a startling concept: a crown of sonnets. 


Sonnets, traditionally, are 14 line poems written in iambic pentameter (5 2-syllable units per line, the 2nd syllable of each is accented), with a strict rhyme scheme. A crown of sonnets is 7 sonnets linked in this way: the last line of the first is the first line of the second, the last line of the second is the first line of the third & so on until the last line of the 7th is the first line of the first.


The heroic crown of sonnets goes further. There are 15 sonnets with the first 14 being linked by last & first lines. The 15th sonnet is the first lines of all the 14 sonnets in order.


Wow, I thought, what a great model for continuity in a series of paintings!


Then, sighing, I assessed that I wouldn't really get that model unless I wrote one.


So I did. Hale & I had also been discussing our fears for the world & our frail hope that our work as artists would somehow contribute to its cure. So beginning in the deep dark of waking one night, I wrote 15 sonnets about ecological trauma & the medicine of poetry & painting. It's called "Corona Gaia" & I'll be posting these over the next few weeks.


I'm making some hand-made book versions & a simple, illustrated chapbook. The image above is the cover of the chapbook.